Teach it to book: calendars, appointments, and call routing

IntermediateLabAI ReceptionistAppointment bookingAI WorkforceHire your first AI Employee · Step 3 of 5

Estimated time · about 30 minutes|Required · Partner Center access, A receptionist with a Capabilities panel, such as your employee from step 2, Calendar sign-in for everyone who will take bookings

Outcomes

✓Connect a calendar the right way, one person at a time

✓Configure a booking link and a team event without the round robin trap

✓Enable the book-appointments capability and choose the right calendar

✓Build a business-hours routing capability that transfers during hours and captures leads after

Put a real appointment on the calendar

You are here: Partner Center, on the same employee you deployed last step. An employee that only answers is a receptionist who never puts anything on the books. Booking is what turns a good conversation into a kept appointment.

Labconnect a calendar

Go to CRM → My Meetings, then the ⋮ menu → Meeting settings → Calendar settings.

1. 1.Select Connect calendar. Each person taking bookings signs in as themselves, not through an admin connecting it on their behalf.
2. 2.Choose Google Calendar or Microsoft 365 / Outlook.com, and grant the requested permissions.

Your calendar shows as connected in Meeting Settings, which lets My Meetings both check for conflicts and create events automatically once a booking is confirmed.

For the full setup, including switching providers later, Setting up calendar integration walks through the rest.

Configure the booking link

Your booking URL is set once, under Meeting settings → General meeting URL. What you build per event type is the duration, the availability window, and the buffer before and after. My Meetings offers durations of 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes, or a custom length; decide which one your receptionist should offer before you test it.

Labbuild one booking link

Stay in My Meetings → Manage booking links → Event types → Create event type.

1. 1.Name the event type and choose its duration.
2. 2.Set your general availability and buffer time before and after.
3. 3.Save, then copy the link.

One event type exists with a working link, ready to hand to your receptionist in the next section.

Create a team event that assigns fairly

For a group instead of one person, create a team event rather than several personal links, and choose an assignment method such as round robin so bookings distribute across the team. Two conditions decide who actually appears in that rotation: each teammate needs their own calendar connected, and round-robin membership comes from the Sales Team you add them to in CRM → Sales Teams, so a teammate missing from either place never gets a turn. Team booking links covers every assignment method in detail.

Enable the Book appointments capability

Labadd Book appointments

Go to your receptionist's Configure page → Capabilities.

1. 1.Select + Add a capability, tick Book appointments, and select Add.
2. 2.On the capability card, set Select event link to book with: to the event type you built above.

Your receptionist can now offer real time slots, collect the booking details it needs, and create the event automatically.

If the employee still carries Record preferred booking times (Voice), which notes a caller's preferred time without booking anything, replace it with Book appointments: a preference is not a kept meeting.

Chat and voice hand off a booking link differently, and both are worth setting deliberately. A lead already using another business's booking tool can get the link directly, mid-conversation, in chat. Voice cannot paste a link into a call, so the honest answer there is that a person will follow up, with an automation sending the link right afterward (the next step covers building that automation).

Book appointments does not collect payment or hold a slot behind one. A business that wants a deposit first ties sending the link to a payment-confirmation automation instead, rather than expecting the booking capability to gate on it.

Route calls by business hours

Business-hours routing is the pattern worth building once and reusing everywhere: transfer during hours, capture the lead after. Rather than folding this logic into an existing capability's prompt, give it a custom capability of its own.

Labbuild the routing capability

Go to Capabilities → + Add a capability → + New capability.

1. 1.Name it something like BusinessHoursCheck and describe what it does.
2. 2.Write the prompt in markdown: numbered steps, with a branch for during hours and a branch for after hours.
3. 3.Inside each branch, reference other capabilities by their exact capitalized name, for example "call the Transfer Call capability," rather than restating what that capability already does.
4. 4.Point the hours check at the business's own knowledge sources instead of a hardcoded list, so a holiday or a seasonal change never needs a manual edit here.

The capability checks the time against the business's real hours and branches correctly, every time it runs.

Do not build a second after-hours capture from scratch: the Capture leads capability your receptionist already runs after hours can extend to ask which department the caller wanted, the same way any other question gets added to its prompt.

Test both directions

Labconfirm both branches

Go to Chat, or the assigned channel.

1. 1.Call or chat during business hours and confirm you get transferred.
2. 2.Call or chat after hours and confirm the AI captures your lead instead.

Both directions work exactly as the routing capability describes them.

If a client needs bookings to land in a scheduling system they already run, that is a deeper build, and this is where to go for it.

What you now have

• A calendar connected the right way, by the person who owns it
• A booking link and, if you need one, a team event that assigns fairly
• A receptionist that books real meetings and hands off a link the right way on every channel
• A business-hours routing capability that transfers during hours and captures leads after, without a second capability doing the same job twice

Knowledge Check

Three quick questions on calendar connection, booking handoffs, and routing by business hours.

Congratulations, you completed this step!

Hire your first AI Employee · Step 3 of 5

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